Slashdot Mirror

There is more matter than anti matter in the universe because certain decays of certain particles have a slight perference to matter. This principle is being studied at accelerators in the USA (SLAC) and Japan (KEK) among others. These two facilities have B factories, which are accelerators that make billions of B mesons and measure the amount of asymmetry between B and anti-B decays which occur from them. For more info checkout: http://www-public.slac.stanford.edu/babar/

it's unlikely this would fly far in the US.

It might fly far enough to keep you in court for four years. In 2000, Ralph Nader's presidential campaign created a parody of the MasterCard "priceless" ads, which had been parodied in several other places previously without a peep from MasterCard. When the Nader ads came out, however, the company atttempted to block stop them from airing, though this was denied. (Interestingly, with the rather small campaign warchest Nader had, the ads probably got more notice than they ever would have if they just aired.) They also sued the Nader campaign and eventually lost... in 2004.

Here is a random assortment of links about the story:

http://lawgeek.typepad.com/lawgeek/2004/03/nader_w ins_pric.html

http://www.commondreams.org/views/091300-102.htm

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/packets002050.shtml

Spanish Flu of 1918-1919.

well... dreyfus wasn't entirely correct.
the human mind ~is~ like a computer.
read "godel escher bach: an eternal golden braid" for a fun and enlightening journey into the nature of minds and machines.

or rather.. how about a rebuttal from "the man" himself:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/reviews/dreyfus /dreyfus.html

jmc rocks. what did dreyfus ever do?

Even if Nvidia's CUDA is as hard as the Ars Technica article suggests, I still hope AMD either makes their chips binary compatible, or makes a compiler that works for CUDA code.

From what I saw at the demo, the AMD stuff was running under Brook. As far as I've been able to make out from nVidia's documentation, CUDA is basically a derivative of Brook that has had a few syntax tweaks and some vendor-specific shiny things added to lock you in to nVidia hardware.

Of course much of that is due to the fact that TeX has been around for so long without any significant changes and, given enough time, XML formats will likely settle toward the same level of quality from different implementations. Still, TeX's consistency is impressive.

It's like that by design. IIRC, Knuth is very concerned with the stability of TeX, in terms of producing predictable output from a given input file. I've read that the plan is to completely freeze the codebase when he dies -- I think he described it as a point when "all remaining bugs will become features" -- and although others will be able to be free to take the code and produce some other typesetting engine from it, "TeX" itself will be set in stone, so you'll always be able to take a TeX document and get the same output from it. This is represented by current version numbers that asymptotically approach pi (e.g. version 3.14, 3.141, 3.1415...) with each bugfix, where the final version will be marked by changing the version "number" to \pi itself. I think METAFONT approaches e in the same way.

I've always thought that this represented a pretty forward-thinking view. Not too many people really think too hard about what will become of their software after they die. But what do you expect from a guy who thinks that this is a stop-the-presses, call-your-sysadmin "dramatic improvement"? Now that's attention to detail. (Or, how about his taxonomy of diamond-shaped road signs?)

Of course much of that is due to the fact that TeX has been around for so long without any significant changes and, given enough time, XML formats will likely settle toward the same level of quality from different implementations. Still, TeX's consistency is impressive.

It's like that by design. IIRC, Knuth is very concerned with the stability of TeX, in terms of producing predictable output from a given input file. I've read that the plan is to completely freeze the codebase when he dies -- I think he described it as a point when "all remaining bugs will become features" -- and although others will be able to be free to take the code and produce some other typesetting engine from it, "TeX" itself will be set in stone, so you'll always be able to take a TeX document and get the same output from it. This is represented by current version numbers that asymptotically approach pi (e.g. version 3.14, 3.141, 3.1415...) with each bugfix, where the final version will be marked by changing the version "number" to \pi itself. I think METAFONT approaches e in the same way.

I've always thought that this represented a pretty forward-thinking view. Not too many people really think too hard about what will become of their software after they die. But what do you expect from a guy who thinks that this is a stop-the-presses, call-your-sysadmin "dramatic improvement"? Now that's attention to detail. (Or, how about his taxonomy of diamond-shaped road signs?)

http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-ATI.html

It's still in beta AFAIK, but it has been in development for quite some time.

The chips are a much different ISA, so there's no way that binaries that will run on G80 hardware will run on an R600. Heck, even the ATi R400 series (x700, x8x0) is not binary-compatible with the current R500 x1000 units.Maybe ATi will make a CUDA compiler, but I am guessing that since folks have already gotten going using the R500 hardware (see: http://folding.stanford.edu/ I doubt that AMD/ATi will make a big effort to use a competitor's technology. Please correct me if I am incorrect, but I am not aware of any groups or programs that use NVIDIA hardware as number-crunchers yet.

It was Slashdotted in the past...

The links to part of the sites covering it are:
http://www.usbwifi.orcon.net.nz/
http://www.stanford.edu/~jstockdl/tmp/usbwifi.orco n.net.nz/

You mentioned a "vast body of work in philosophy and brain science". I must point out that the body of work in "brain science" (you probably should have said "cognitive sciences"), is

utterly irrelevant -this is strictly a philosophical issue. Having said that, it is worth noting that by no means is there consensus within the domain of philosophy with respect to freewill.

freewill. "Choosing" is a cognitive act which is achieved by certain information processing agents. When an agent takes in sensory information, evaluates that information, and selects one of several behavioral options, it is said to be engaged in the process of choosing. It is in virtue of instantiating this process -which can be understood in entirely deterministic terms- that a creature is said to have possess freewill. In other words, as an information processing agent navigates through its world of various sensory percepts and so on, it chooses (deterministically) which options to take, based on its cognitive architecture and perhaps some grab bag of useful heuristics -this is freewill.

elaborate, I disapprove of using a column that doesn't cite its sources as a source. Considering Scott Adams occasionally makes fun of people who regard anecdotal evidence as a valid authority, perhaps he should be less quick to use it himself.

Before I go back to the main conversation, I would like to argue that evolution is a fairly clear concept, and probably the one part of the sciences that we scientists understand best. I can't

A complex computer (brain) in control of a body creates random scenarios of potential outcomes of actions, evaluates the amount of benefit derived from each according to a complex set of rules consisting of a hereditary and learned instruction set, picks one of the actions that it predicts to result in the highest benefit and implements it, observes the outcome of the action and based on the amount of real benefit the action brings, and how well the scenario matches reality, it modifies both the learned instruction set for evaluating benefit and the circuitry by which it functions, working as a complete unit, without the interference of another entity to whom this definition applies. Now one can argue that there are no random variables and so the scenarios are predefined, but that is wrong - there are random variables. (Quantum Mechanics contains true random aspects) Personally, I don't think that matters, pseudo random variables are enough for me. (A comptibilist standpoint - I think of will as no longer free if an outside entity alters it)

Yeah, it sounds too weird to be true, doesn't it? Unfortunately most VCRs have automatic gain control in the pass-through path...
http://cse.stanford.edu/class/cs201/projects-99-00 /dmca-2k/macrovision.html

The CPU can encrypt memory transactions on the bus. There are several research proposals that address this issue, btw (e.g. Xom). My point - they can continue the arms race as well.

I live in Asia, and out of a few billion people in this region less than 200 people have died from avian bird flu. Source WHO.

Of the people infected, mortality rate is 90-100%. The reason so few people have died so far is that it only have spread from bird to human. The day it mutates to spread from human to human, we might look forward to a pandemic that makes the 1918 influenza pandemic look minor. And this is one of the most quickly mutating organisms known to man.

In order to prevent that, we must minimize contact between infected birds and humans, and especially birds with the H5N1 virus and humans who already have a human transmitted version of influenza.

Am I concerned. No.

That is because you are suffering from the "well I don't understand it, so it can't be true" fallacy.

A car takes between 20 to 200 horsepower to run. One horsepower equals about 750 watts. So that's about 15KW to 150KW per hour of running time.

First, you forget that a car doesn't use all of it's power constantly. A gasoline engine has a huge margin over what's needed to maintain a car's speed just to enable quick acceleration. Second, Watts are a power measure, not an energy measure. The only reason you need to worry about power when it comes to batteries is that they can only release so much power at a time.

Still, due to the wonders that is the efficiency of a electric motor(90+%) and regenerative braking, you can generally get by with 1/2 - 1/3 the horsepower rating for an electric vehicle over a gasoline one. The problem has always been one that the amount of energy you can stuff into a gas tank is orders of magnitude than a similar size or weight of batteries. Electric - Great motor, lousy storage, Hydrocarbon - Fantastic storage, lousy motor.'

Another wierdness is that gasoline engines are rated by their maximum horsepower, whereas an electric motor is rated at it's continous duty cycle. That means that you can 'undersize' the engine even more, because it's quite possible to run many motors at 300% for short periods of time. This is because the main problem with overdriving an electric motor is simply the motor's capability to disperse heat. You can safely overdrive it for short periods, as long as you don't fry the engine. Larger engines use heavier wire, reducing heat generation and increasing heat dispersion capabilities. Larger motor's are also more efficient on average though, so reducing below a certain level doesn't gain you much.

So an electric car can get by with a much smaller engine than a gasoline one(just overdrive during acceleration, controlled by the computer).

As for the wattage required, the tesla roadster takes 110 watt-hours on average for a kilometer. As the article noted, the roadster is 'performance tuned', not 'economy tuned'. Still, it's a smaller vehicle, incabable to holding the cargo average users would ask of a primary car.

That would be .176 kw/h per mile. For a 300 mile charge(It's what my 30mpg car with a 10gal tank can do), you'd need a battery capable of holding 52.8 kw/h. Let's call it 60 kw/h. To charge that in 1 hour would require 272 amps @ 220 volts. Yuck. Hello 0000 wire. 3.3kA for a 5 minute charge. Now we're talking silly. Let's kick it up to 600Volts. Ah, much better @100 amps for a 1 hour charge, though 1.3kA is still high. A 1% waste at that level would still be 13amps@600volts=7.8kw, or about 5 hairdryers. Doable with fans. Wouldn't want it to be much higher though.

I think they're counting on an activly cooled extremely high voltage battery, that's still more efficient than stuff on the market today.

If you explore these areas, and find out that the HIV has actually never been seen, just the antibodies...supposedly...how on earth are scientists finding a vaccination or any treatment for an unknown/unseen virus? I wish I was kidding.

You sure are kidding. It has been sighted!! :-p
http://www.stanford.edu/group/virus/retro/2005gong ishmail/HIV.html
And there are many actual pictures and also the reconstructed structure of the virus here:
http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=en&q=h iv+virus+image

When is your 99% number coming from? By the way, TSP doesn't restrict you to "travel in straight lines", the distance measure is arbitrary. Indeed, if you restrict to problems in the euclidean space (i.e., distances are always measured in straight line distance), you can get an approximation scheme, i.e., you can approximate as close as you want. But not for the general TSP problem.

Some more videos...
High level explanation
Protein matching
Sudoku

Also, here's some slightly older talk at Stanford with a higher-level audience

Additionally, it's not exactly a "true quantum computer"(tm) - but it utilizes quantum mechanics as a quantum computer would. So it quacks like a duck, etc.

Why not just use robots.txt?

This seems an unfair question. Suppose a group of robbers is robbing my neighborhood and I find one of them and take them to court. Suppose they say "We have a well-established policy that if you don't want your house robbed, you should leave a note to that effect tacked to your front door." Even supposing they have, in fact, well-advertised this policy, does that make it my fault for not putting up such a note?

robots.txt is an internet protocol issue, and an informal one, and no robot is obliged to heed it. That Google does and others don't is certainly good, but that doesn't mean they haven't violated the law because they've provided a way of people opting out of what they do. To my non-lawyerly understanding, copyright license can't happen by accident or some informal gesture, it requires actual permission. So if there is a violation, the violation doesn't seem to be mitigated by the practice of the offender of creating their own out-of-band mechanism not prescribed by law.

It might be that this is fair use, of course. That's a separate question. But fair use doesn't hinge on the availability of opt-out (i.e., availability or absence of a robots.txt), at least not in the US. You might argue a fifth criterion should be adopted, as has sometimes been argued for other reasons, but I don't see it there as a reliable element. So any fair use argument has to be made, it would seem to me, on the basis of whether the a priori use is fair, whether or not the author is capable of engaging a private cease-and-desist order absent court assistance.

To say otherwise is to say that a defense against any lawsuit would be a claim that the party would stand down if you just complained to it. The problem with this posture, much though it might reduce load on the courts, is that it makes it impossible to bring a case against people who prey only on the weak. There are plenty of people who don't know or care to contact their oppressors, and yet you can't say that it's ok to keep preying until a complaint is made, and moreover that a formal complaint will be dismissed merely because a lighter weight complaint could have worked.

There's also the issue of fair use itself based on content. I'm mixed on this, having been in journalism myself and having been on both sides of this. On the one hand, Google provides a possible advertising service; that's in Google's favor. It's opt-out rather than opt-in; that's not in Google's favor. They use a certain amount of the story they have farmed from elsewhere. To the extent that text is small, that's in Google's favor. To the extent that some people only want a small blurb anyway, that's not in Google's favor, since many news organizations present themselves as portals themselves, and Google may be detracting from that. (You might legitimately disagree, but part of what's at issue in this case is whether the infringer gets to decide. The whole notion of freedom surrounds "whose freedom", and present copyright law says it's the content creator's choice. If you disagree, argue for changing the law, not for willful violation... which seems to me to be just advocating lawlessness.)

The problem is that Google is doing a service, but it is not charging the people who benefit. Rather, it is "taxing without representation" the other services on the web, taking incremental value from them in order to provide its own at no cost. Its opt-out nature, its indirect charging, etc. all contribute to a weird sense of unease about it all.

I'll close on the issue of "chilling effect" with this Supreme Court case, which may or may not be directly relevant, but which informs my personal sense of unease. The fact patterns don't exactly overlap, but I feel obliged

its called a monopoly. It puts companies in a position where they can't say "Fuck off" because doing would result in a massive loss of customers

Well it's more like the prisoner's dilemma imho. If both ATI and Nvidia said "fuck off", MS would have a big problem. If only one of them said it however...

Looks like if you don't have ACM digital library access and don't feel like trudging to a library you can find a copy here: http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/hilli s-steele-data-parallel-algorithms.pdf

For a group of characters (substring) in the middle of the file, you can locally build a table that maps whatever the incoming parser state is (at the beginning of the substring) to what the corresponding outgoing state would be at then end, and then that table lets you process the whole substring in unit time. I like to think of it as the parsing equivalent of a carry-lookahead adder. Probably best to read the article if you're curious.

I went ahead and signed up (what can I say, I'm a sucker for science) but I'm really hoping they make it clear what will be running on the agents.

One thing quite curious, the "introduction" images are almost direct yanks from xgrid@stanfard including the Dashboard widget the push as their own from the xgrid widget SDK linked with the xgrid@stanford project as well.

Should be interesting how this shapes up. 91 total agents right now, 0 working :-P

We need to keep the concepts of plagarism and copyright seperate in our thinking.

Under normal circumstances, I'd agree. However, the article (and I admit I read about half of it in detail and then barely skimmed the rest) didn't seem to me to be about plagiarism, which is (I assume) why the subject line upthread is "The /. headline is typically bad." It really seems to be an article about information-sharing, not about plagiarism. He cites numerous well-known authors with apparent (but seemingly ill-founded) concern that they have plagiarized, but I would say that the fact that those various authors were not discredited is illustrative of the power of both fair use and established/approved literary techniques such as homage, parody, etc.

As to calling things contributions, perhaps it might help to name the contributions we claim where we can. We should not denigrate even the smallest honest contributions. And a small contributor today may be a large contributor next year.

To the extent that your remark can be construed as an affirmation of the age-old line "one man's trash is another man's treasure", I certainly don't mean to detract from it. But I still have some concerns that your suggestion is not strong enough to really solve the problem. (My remarks here ran longer than I wanted, and I edited them down a bit. I hope the result isn't incoherent as a result.)

The problem is not that people can't or shouldn't start with small contributions and grow them to big ones. The problem is that referring to something by its history or pedigree is not the same intellectual activity as referring to something by class. One can trivially, but uselessly, describe a pedigree system as a class system, by saying that every pedigree names a class, but it defeats the ability to do generalized reference to something because each name is so heavily overloaded that short names start to have no meaning. As I was reading one of the books in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game trilogy, there was reference to a hierarchically oriented net that sounded like the idea that kids grew up posting in their town and if they gained enough stature, they were allowed to post nationally, and so on. There are obvious disadvantages of this when some governments are repressive, but just because something has disadvantages doesn't mean it's got no advantages. There's some value to saying that people should not post their first grade homework for world-wide scrutiny on usenet.

And note that I'm not trying to say that textual size implies importance. It probably tends to be correlated, but it's possibly different. A remark like "Fixed a big security hole." might be accompanied by a one-line change and yet the change might be a substantive contribution. But most small changes are not of that kind. And documenting that you only did a small change doesn't fix that--rather, it invites people to so overwhelm people with documentation that you can't tell it was just a small change. That's how lawyers have learned to address requirements for disclosure: don't withhold, but instead drown the opposition in so much disclosure that they can't find the thing they care about.

So I'm leary that encouraging "disclosure" as a standard for saying you made a contribution is, while a necessary condition, not a sufficient condition.

One man's "creative influence" could very well be one lawyer's "plagiarism". It is all a matter of degree.

There are surely gray areas, but your remark suggests there is nothing but gray areas, and I don't think that's true. Under the law, copyright protects the form of a work, not an idea. It comes right out and says that plainly, in a way that law doesn't always do. Just to make sure there is no confusion. As such, "creative influence" insofar as it is an "idea" is generally protected.

The author of the article seemed to speak at times as if he were arguing against things that are in fact not in play. It is considered fair use to quote one another in the course of public dialog. (The right of fair use happens to be implementationally threatened by coercive DRM attempting to conform to the DMCA, but that's a slightly different problem. I have argued (but so far have not managed to convince any actual lawyers) that the legal concept of an easement (from Real Estate law) needs to be injected into Intellectual Property law in order to address the present state of affairs in that regard. For rights to be meaningful, having some way to enforce them seems useful. There are a number of mechanisms for addressing infringement, but there needs to be a counterbalancing force to address fair use. That the US Government Copyright FAQ does not even mention "fair use" in the set of questions is perhaps telling in and of itself.)

It is trivially true that as you morph an idea from a single source, there is a point in which the idea is still so much the original that the new form carries with it no serious value and cannot legitimately be called its own work. So in this regard, your remark is technically correct.

However, another way of interpreting copyright might be not to regard it as a right of use, but a standard we hold ourselves to before we call something a contribution. That is, if I take a play you wrote, change a word or two, and then offer it back to the public, odds are the public will say "this wasn't a material contribution". Forget copyright issues, my obligation to say I have contributed something is higher. If I'm a writer, even a good one, and call a press conference every time I type a period or comma, eventually people will get tired. It's not a novel, or even a chapter, until a chunkier contribution has been made. And copyright just enforces that same notion, but between people instead of internally within them.

So maybe it is just a matter of degree after all. But maybe degree matters. Maybe the whole point is, as in Aristotle's Virtue Ethics that at either end of the spectrum is an "unreasonable extreme", and that there really is no well-defined, uniquely determined midpoint, but that the goal is to seek a balance in spite of that fact, so that one doesn't slide to one of the endpoints. To say that any contribution, no matter how trivial, that includes another's work is ok is to create spam. To say that any contribution, no matter how large, that includes another's work, is infringing is to create a society that doesn't grow through interaction.

The posts says "For copyright reasons I can't post the file or a complete disassembly. However, I can describe the program in terms of 16-bit DOS C:" While I understand the author's worries, it's frightening he feels this way. He shouldn't have to worry.

Doesn't fair use specifically include an exception for Comment and Criticism? If the whole code is being criticized and commented on, it should be reproduced in full, particularly given that it's distribution and dissemination does not harm Skype's marketshare.

Never mind that a reasonable interpretation of freedom of the press demands that the entire code be reported on and shared in an informative matter. Right? Right?

--sabre86

I wonder why people seem to forget the inventions done by Douglas Engelbart. "What did he do?", you might ask. Or maybe you say something like "oh, the mouse guy, right?". Well, If I was only to point out one thing he did, I would mention what we call "the mother of all demos" which he gave in december 1968. There he demonstrated the use of a mouse, hypertext linking and video conferencing. Again: He demonstrated the use of a mouse and hypertext linking in documents more than 20 years before Tim Berners-Lee "invented" the web.

Some references for those interested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart
http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html
http://www.bootstrap.org/

In the end, Linux may not run at all on *any* PC because of this.
This is a perfectly acceptable (though not-at-all desireable) outcome, from the idealist point-of-view: "Give me liberty or give me death". Freedom is not something that you can compromise, because the instant you do, freedom no longer exists. Instead, what you have is varying degrees of "negative liberty" (see: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive -negative/ )

This is why I wonder why BSD wasn't pushed. It does not have any license worries, and could work just as well on a desktop.
Very, very good point. The pragmatists would be better off taking this route.

Ron Fedkiw at Stanford also has a lot of very impressive demonstrations of liquids, smoke, fire, cloth, rigid bodies, elasticity, and fracturing. The videos are definitely worth checking out: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~fedkiw/ I especially like the water being poured into the glass. It's nearly photo realistic.

Even all our sources of uranium will be depleted so day in the next few hundred years.

I forgot to mention something relevant that is known to all academics but apparently unknown to many /. readers.

There are two types of publishers: for-profit and non-profit. The for-profit publishers are commercial corporations like Elsevier. They, as is their duty to their shareholders, charge what the market will bear, do everything they can to jack up their prices, etc. One for-profit journal might cost an individual $200/year; while a library would pay $500-$1000/year or more. All numbers are approximate.

The non-profits are the professional societies like IEEE. In the US, a non-profit organization is allowed the privilege of being a non-profit in return for providing some benefit to society. IEEE's income is membership fees (I pay IEEE $200/year incl some journals), conference registration fees (perhaps $200/day), journal subscriptions ($40-$100/year), and misc. The professional societies set the prices just high enough to break even (and pay overhead). That's a totally different philosophy.

Even a narrow field may have 10 relevant journals. If your work is interdisciplinary, then there may be 30 journals (and many conferences) that occasionally publish something interesting. Everyone is starting new journals.

While both classes of journals are technically obsolete, only the for-profit journals' prices are breaking the libraries' budgets. First the smaller colleges like RPI got hit. (RPI cancelled most of its print journals and is now cancelling many of its online subscriptions.) However even Stanford, Cornell, etc, are now feeling the pinch. The current solution for the poorer libraries is to pay for any individual articles that researchers ask for. In response, the commercial publishers may now charge $20 for one article, and that's rising.

As a researcher, I feel it my moral duty to support the society journals whenever possible. However, sometimes the publishers' journals are excellent. There's a feedback loop here. A journal is defined to be good if papers (mostly in other journals) cite its papers. Therefore people want to publish there, so its editors get to select the best, etc. This is related to the concept that sometimes the best SW for a particular app is commercial.

More tidbits:

In at least two recent cases, the complete board of editors of a for-profit journal have gotten so angry at their own journal's price (set by the publisher) that they've quit en masse and formed a competing non-profit journal.

For-profit publishers can be sensitive on this topic. Around 1994, Gordon & Breach sued the American Institute of Physics and American Physical Society for publishing a survey showing that their journals were among the most expensive. AIP/APS won. See http://barschall.stanford.edu/index.html

There are many online stories about this. Librarians have been debating it for more than 10 years now. Here is one ref: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/frazier/03frazier .html

My own feeling: It's time for a reorganization of the whole higher-ed and research system. Abstractly, things have never been better (in many fields of CS). I can do research on a laptop; I can learn what a researcher in Tasmania is doing from his website. However, the institutional system is more and more obsolete and irrelevant, and indeed, more and more, hindering progress.

http://www.library.ucsf.edu/research/scholcomm/sti ckershock.html

http://library.stanford.edu/scholarly_com/data/jnl _price.pdf

http://library.stanford.edu/scholarly_com/

http://www.library.ucsf.edu/research/scholcomm/sti ckershock.html

http://library.stanford.edu/scholarly_com/data/jnl _price.pdf

http://library.stanford.edu/scholarly_com/

Saving me the time to look it up on the arXive.

Date (v1): Thu, 27 Apr 2006 20:31:59 GMT
...
Date (revised v4): Sun, 1 Oct 2006 15:25:25 GMT (343kb)

So the article in question is nearly a year old and, upon further investigations ( http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep?c=HEP -PH/0604255 ) has been cited 5 times since. I fail to see how this is news.

I have a background in this reality and would advise anyone reading the source of this thread to take a moment and look up the following 'word set' on any search engine:

Geothermal Injection Induced Earthquake

Due to increased seismic activity generated by injection (studies done in Colorado) Hawaii turned down geothermal power.

Here are a few links to get one started:

Man-Made Earthquakes & Press Coverage (Anderson Springs, CA, USA)
http://andersonsprings.org/

Anderson Springs is part of an USGS earthquake area known as "The Geysers"
http://quake.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Quakes/quakes0_fau lt.htm

Geothermal Power Plant Triggers Earthquake in Switzerland
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/01/geothermal _powe.php

Injection induced stresses in geothermal fields. (References)
https://pangea.stanford.edu/people/cv_nav.php?pers onnel_id=477

Since I choose to be anonymous and this will be marked down and to get something off my chest.

A number of years ago I provided information about a technology that only a hand-full of people are involved with and was called a troll by one of your moderators.

I am IEEE published in the area I mentioned in that post, your moderator obviously could not access, or did not take the time to access these records, and went into name calling.

I have waited for years for the following to show up on the Internet and somebody finally posted it. I believe all moderators should be required to read it (from 1981):

Fairwitnessing

The Case for a New Social Role

(From a talk presented at the FORTH Interest Group meeting, May 23, 1981.)

Four pages, starting here:

http://www.flyingsnail.com/missingbbs/ct15.html

WRT to "watch a conversation between two people and, using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon":

Here's a link to the actual research that they are likely talking about:

http://godel.stanford.edu/~niekrasz/papers/PurverE hlenEtAl06_Shallow.pdf

As you might expect, the ComputerWorld article's summary of the technology is rather optimistic. Nonetheless, this stuff really does exist, and shows some promise in both military and general applications.

Not forgetting: http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/ for Redhat. Also noone has mentioned the fact the Windows VST's (virtual instruments) can now run in linux with a combination of Wine, jack and Vsthost. http://ladspavst.linuxaudio.org/

PlanetCCRMA http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/ is a collection of RPMs intended for audio workstation use that can be added to a Fedora Core 5 install (or 1-4, or RedHat9.) It includes a low-latency kernel, and apps for audio work.

Your hardware matters. RME's Hammerfall soundcards are very high quality, and designed with Linux compatibility in mind (kudos.)

For multi-track recording and work requiring low-latency, I believe you're stuck with Linux; AFAIK the BSDs will not provide real-time kernel access for non-root users.

There is an interesting related subject called Dual Photography, where the "light source" is one (or more) simple photocells, and the "camera" is a video projector or steerable point light source such as a laser pointer.
The computer can render what the image would look like under any combination of lighting from the original photocell position(s). This technique can create images with just a point light source and a photocell, and no camera or lens at all.
This is only applicable to "still life" photos, where the subject sits still in a darkened room for several minutes while the light source scans the scene. The linked page summarizes the technique, and links to a 19MB PDF paper that contains more info and several example images.

There is an interesting related subject called Dual Photography, where the "light source" is one (or more) simple photocells, and the "camera" is a video projector or steerable point light source such as a laser pointer.
The computer can render what the image would look like under any combination of lighting from the original photocell position(s). This technique can create images with just a point light source and a photocell, and no camera or lens at all.
This is only applicable to "still life" photos, where the subject sits still in a darkened room for several minutes while the light source scans the scene. The linked page summarizes the technique, and links to a 19MB PDF paper that contains more info and several example images.

In many cases recycling isn't economical, or even environmentally friendly. For example, recycling laser-printed office paper isn't necessarily a good idea.

Aluminum cans, on the other hand, make good sense for recycling in most cases.

So instead of "recycle, recycle, recycle" how about "recycle something if that recycling doesn't cause more energy use and chemical pollution than making an new one".

But wait, I forgot... there can be no dissent from the religion of environmentalism.

Please, PLEASE go read this. Summarized, licenses are all about copyright, and you can not ever relicense work for which you are not the copyright owner, i.e. the actual author. Licenses are merely grants which allow you to do a subset of things you are otherwise forbidden to do by copyright law, and similarly the BSD license grants you a subset of these, obviously not including the right to apply different license terms at your whim. Work that is released under the BSD license therefore stays under the BSD license, unless the author explicitly gives out a different license for the work as well. And remember, if you make changes to the work, you own only the changes, obviously you don't suddenly own the complete work! What the GPL license merely says is that in order to remain in compliance with the license, you must GPL-license any changes you make as well.

Actually they've been trying to implement an uncrackable watermarking system which would flag restricted music, then they wanted to mandate all recording devices and computers everywere detect these watermarks (at an increased expense in terms of cost for hardware and/or processing time--scanning all audio data is not free). It was called SMDI. Didn't really fly: first off, Professor Ed Felton showed he could easily crack the watermarking. Second, the bills which would've enforced things like the mandatory watermark detection (such as the SSSCA --info at EFF) caused a huge uproar. I think the MPAA also wanted it for video too.

I mean those systems could cause major problems. Just imagine if you are filming your best friend's wedding, some joker walks by with his jukebox--maybe not even audiable enough for you to notice, but loud enough for the system to detect it, and the watermarking causes your camera to stop recording. Let's say you lose the "I do" part. That could really happen.

From what I understand, banks and national treasuries have convinced some software and hardware developers to detect watermarking for photographic things. Such as Photoshop and printer drivers and such. Some printers also create a fingerprint so supposedly the secret service (or whatever agency controls currency fraud in your country) can trace the printed paper back to who printed it.

who doesn't want to get rid of dark energy/matter and hyperinflation

The people who are making measurements of dark matter, that is who.

SRP would go a long way to prevent phishing more reliably, and you don't even need a trusted authority (though one is recommended).

SRP is a password-based system, rather than a key-based system. SRP validates not just that the client knows the password, but that the server knows the password (hash), all the while not revealing anything useful to an eavesdropper or a man in the middle. It uses the password to establish a shared secret (session key) between the client and server for further communication.

It would help with phishing, because if the server you're connecting to doesn't have your password (hash), the logon attempt will fail without giving the phisher anything useful. SSL isn't enough for this, because phishers just get SSL certificates.

The weak point of SRP is establishing the password at account creation, and here SSL is important. Banks would go further and use out-of-band communication (phone, etc.) to help with account creation.

Web browsers don't currently support SRP, but supposedly the Firefox team wants to add it. An important part of such a feature will be making unfakeable dialog boxes so that novice computer users understand when it is safe to enter an important password. UI design means a lot.

And you know what's really weird? If the Sun just winked out of existence right this minute, the Earth would continue in it's orbit for 8 minutes before flying off into space. Why? Because gravity also propagates at the speed of light.

For those of you who would like to read the original article (and not just the summary in New Scientist), it is available here.

This is typically preposterous nonsense that one would expect from the increasingly Indophobic academia

http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2005/11/17/panel PromotesUnderstanding
http://www.indiacause.com/columns/OL_040912.htm

and get reported by a leftist rag like "the Guardian" (as referenced by wikipedia), bastion of bashing all things that are Indian, and especially Hindu. They hate all things remotely related to Hinduism or Hindu culture so pardon me if I have a little trouble taking such outlandish claims seriously.